> When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it"
It doesn't need to have flashing pictures to make kids say, "I want it". Kids will say "I want it" if it so much as combines three bright colors or has an anthropomorphic animal. Heck, lots of kids will say "I want it" just because it exists.
The theory is that this need not be the case. Originally, cable TV claimed to be advertisement free, as the stations were paid by the cable companies. This could happen again, if the rates were raised.
It's worth noting that Microsoft LOST 4 billion something on the X-Box. So, in short, Microsoft thinks having a gaming console in the US (and Japan/Europe/Etcetera to a lesser extent) is more important than the entire 1 billion+ population of India.
What makes it seem odd to me is that the only argument I hear for GNOME is the licensing argument. Yeah, GNOME means commercial apps don't have to pay a dime to use GTK+ and so-on and so-forth, while on KDE they need to pay a few thousand for Qt. But that's held against a wealth of other features KDE has that GNOME is lacking, and the commercial app that can't afford to pay a couple thousand bucks to use Qt is pretty well screwed to start with.
I just expect a choice to be based off of more than that one point, and I keep not seeing it. I mean, KDE and Qt are just about universally considered easier to program for than GTK and GNOME, so you know that will save more money than the licenses will, and KDE has a better developed set of libraries as best I can tell. As I said, I just don't see the reasoning.
I always wonder why so many distributions insist on being GNOME-based. In general, it results in things like the list of apps that edubuntu uses. In short, the list has 18 KDE-apps, 1 GNOME-app, and 6 apps that use GTK but no desktop specific libs, despite the fact that Ubuntu is nominally GNOME-based. It seems that GNOME offers little in the way of important libraries, or more groups already writing GTK software for Linux would bother to make them GNOME apps, and less people would go to KDE as a platform.
Now, don't get me wrong, GNOME has made some great backend stuff. Beagle and GStreamer in particular jump to mind, but the desktop as a whole just doesn't seem to offer all that much. It's not even that I necessarily think that GNOME is the wrong choice (although I personally wouldn't choose it), it's just that all the distros that choose it (including Ubuntu and most everything else) don't appear to give any strong argument for why, so I'm somewhat confused as to what they base their decisions on.
Wouldn't the really elegant solution be to install the update in parellel, treated as a different version installed simultaneously, and have all new processes use the new version, only fully removing the old version when it is no longer in use, as opposed to just trying to get it freed up and doing nothing if it can't be freed up? I mean, last I'd heard, it was perfectly workable to have two versions of a library installed.
If, for that law, those charges are sufficient, it seems plenty strong. Afterall, aren't those rather patently true in this instance? I mean, it sure as heck makes itself hard to uninstall, and I'm quite certain it claims to be needed but actually is not.
If he described that as "The Street Performer Protocol", he's wrong. Street performers don't refuse to play if no-one pays them because that just doesn't work. Can you imagine if there was a guy on the street corner with a guitar, completely still, with a sign that said, "give me a dollar and I'll start playing"?
The street-performer method is what open-source currently has: a person goes out that and starts doing stuff, hoping that people will take note and grant money out of appreciation. This is wildly different from a ransom model.
"If they can sell all there songs for $1 I don't see why these couldn't sell at the same price."
Because people really, really like music and most of that music is new and fresh. Also, one good song gives more use than one good video. Owned videos tend to be watched two or three times by a person, maybe a few times a year if they are really good (this is purely anecdotal). Good music will often be listened to two or three times a day for several weeks in a row (also anecdotal). All told, the music is usually used for more total time due to the fact that it is passive entertainment. That is, you can listen to a song while doing almost anything, but you can do relatively little that is useful while watching a video.
They need to realize that, with those old shows, they have a very different market. The amount of people who desperately want their old shows to the point that they'll pay what they would for a recent one is very low, while the amount of people who will say, "Hey that was a kinda cool show. I'd like to have a copy of that for a couple of cents," is very high. And, since the entire show has already had its run and made its money, selling them at $0.25 or $0.50 a show instead of $1 per episode is still making a profit.
Naturally, I'd consider paying a half-dollar an episode for one of the good slightly old shows, like The Prisoner or The Six Million Dollar Man.
Well, technically, if someone else put up a server that worked with that client, you could use it without paying a monthly fee to the makers of WoW. That might sound ridiculous, but it has happened. Look up info on the UO Sphere server, which allows for independently hosted Ultima Online servers. Since the server was made independently of the Origin-run servers, they won the court-case about the issue and can legally offer free hosting for the UO client. A similar thing happened with Ragnarok Online, as I understand it, and they also won the court-case to allow for free servers.
Although it may seem unlikely that this would happen with WoW, it is possible and legal (although they might lose the case if it went to court, same as the reverse-engineered battlenet server did, being as Blizzard has won this sort of thing before).
A lot more incentive would be there if the government tried to charge all companies a direct cost for all clean-up required by the manufacture and expected usage of their products. And, if things were impossible to clean up (air pollution) charged for potential side-effects. After all, I'm going to have to pay for the crap they do sometime, so I'd rather if they had to pay for it now.
And, of course, the companies would pass the costs on to the customers and the prices of things that require a lot of pollution to produce or produce lots of pollution would skyrocket.
Right now, the US Government does everything on a very select basis, rather than trying to follow a reasonable and broad rule. For example, the way that nuclear power plants are massively charged for their nuclear waste while coal plants don't pay hardly anything for all the air pollution they put out that we can't possibly clean up.
Besides, that's the way capitalism should work: the product that is *actually* cheapest becomes the most popular. Right now, we just ignore tons of the expenses.
It has 300+ hours of batterylife on only 3 AA batteries. How's that work? It only has a four-line monotype display and a keyboard, and it only has memory for ~80 pages types. But, if what you want to do is write, it's a portable word processor for $300 with the best battery life of ANY device on the market.
(I don't even care about a hand-crank; it only takes 3 damn batteries and it runs for about half a year at my usage levels.)
Half of the games out there intentionally avoid realistic graphics. Instead, they have cartoony, silly graphics. They make graphics that actually work for the game. And, guess what, they're quite successful.
You're dead on accurate with that one. I want a benchmark that will tell me what kind of performance I can expect if I have a logo I am editing in Illustrator that I open in Photoshop to clean up a bit and then insert into a document in InDesign while I'm trying to make it look similar in the webpage I'm putting together in TextPad, viewing both final documents through Acrobat, IE, FireFox, and Safari, all at the same time. (While listening to music.)
And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Although I rarely do all of that at once, it has been known to happen. And don't even get me started about what happens when I have something compiling behind all of that. I'm just thankful, in a way, that since I don't do 3D work I'm not tossing Maya into that mix.
The complaint usually involved here against China and India is in fact a valid one, especially against China. That is, they have less strict labor laws than the US, which is an unfair advantage of sorts. One of the main things increasing the cost of labor in the US is all the benefits companies have to pay to their workers and all the other restrictions put on them. India isn't too hideously far from the US in this regard, but it does have somewhat lower standards (from second-hand anecdotal evidence, I may be wrong), but China has far looser labor laws.
In the US, we had many unions organize and fight hard to get the rights we have. If we consider those rights to be inherent rights,then China is competing by denying rights to its citizens, which is not reasonable.
That is not to say that, even with those rights, they could not still undercut us, but they definitely couldn't undercut is by so vast a margin.
Let's go to the robotic track-and-field events and watch as robots designed to move quickly while pretending they're humans move quickly. Seriously, watching robots in any human only-sports would be incredibly boring. Robots will shine in sports designed for robots and sports where the primary element is not human (Formula 1, horse racing, camel racing).
Well, if they're paying only 50,000 a year per employee, on average, and half of their costs are in hardware and outside resources of other sorts, each million employs ten people, or 2,500 people to 5,000 people total in the company. By contrast, IBM employs more than 300,000 people and has revenues of about 100 billion each year. Note the orders of magnitude separating those numbers.
"Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?"
I guess we'll find out in the next few years, won't we? Of course, the sale hasn't been approved, yet, so it might only be the next few months.
And, the anti-trust act stops abuse of monopoly, not existence of monopoly, and I don't see any huge signs of that from the cable companies. Of course, someone here might have an example. Feel free to contribute one.
If GCC and BASH have problems due to memory errors, it's a problem with your memory, not those Nvidia drivers. If the errors aren't due to memory errors, it's not the Nvidia drivers. A great many people, myself included, use Nvidia drivers every day and revel in the fact that they are extremely reliable and have excellent 3D support.
That problem arises because "What is the German population" does not have a real answer. The population of *Germany* is what you want. The German population, even in Germany, is not the same as that, and really requires that an area be specified. However, of course, Google, doesn't do that specific of stuff well, so asking for a "German population" likely won't get an accurate answer for a while.
Not designed with longevity in mind? What are you talking about? I'm still running the cheapest piece of crap I could find four years ago. An entire system (minus the video card, I reused my Voodoo3 2000) for only 200 bucks and it still works. My mother still has her fully working PC from back in 1997, without problems (although she's upgrading this month because she wants something a bit faster).
And anything newer than that, how do you know it won't last? For that matter, do you not realize that most of the components are identical? Apple doesn't usually make their own hardware, they buy it, and they buy it from the same people the PC manufacturers buy it from.
In general, artists make money off of concerts. If you start out assuming that all your money will come from concerts, you can afford to have all your music online for free. Just make certain that the music you put online if not in some index directory, listed like:
Song 1
Another Song
Song 3
Here's a Song
Instead, list the songs in a way that will associate them with the concerts and make people want to come to the concerts. For example:
We'll be playing down at the Three Frogs next Monday (the 3rd) from 6 to 9. Come see our show. We'll be playing:
Our Rocking First Some
Some Other Song
Another Song - This will be the first time we play this one
And Another Song
And, make sure you always play them at the event before letting people download them, but mention that you've got another song ready and will be playing it soon. Something of a teaser.
Also, since your webpage is most of your publication method, make it a place people want to check on regularly. Give all the band-members blogs on that site and make sure you keep news up-to-date. Keep an easy listing of where you'll be playing.
Also, make sure the site lets the fans participate. It could work to let them upload recordings of live shows, along with comments, so that they can keep talking about your show on your site even long after it's over.
And don't stop with just a little bit of stuff. Keep the site fresh, but don't let it change radically. Shift things bit by bit so that people gon't get too bored with it, but keep what exists in the same place so its easy to find.
Note that most of what you mentioned was invented in the 80's and then used in the 90's. Therefore, it seems possible some stuff invented in the 90's still hasn't become available
Also:
- stunning advancements in computer architecture
Eh? What stunning advancements? Most of the architectures in use today go all the way back to the early 70's. They've merely become commercially available to the average Joe in recent years.
The Cell Architecture is new, as was the Emotion Engine. The Crusoe/Efficeon stuff was also new, although it didn't really pan out. I think that the design of the Blue Gene systems is also fairly new.
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> When kids see flashing pictures on cereal boxes we don't expect them to just ask for the product, but to say, "I want it"
It doesn't need to have flashing pictures to make kids say, "I want it". Kids will say "I want it" if it so much as combines three bright colors or has an anthropomorphic animal. Heck, lots of kids will say "I want it" just because it exists.
The theory is that this need not be the case. Originally, cable TV claimed to be advertisement free, as the stations were paid by the cable companies. This could happen again, if the rates were raised.
It's worth noting that Microsoft LOST 4 billion something on the X-Box. So, in short, Microsoft thinks having a gaming console in the US (and Japan/Europe/Etcetera to a lesser extent) is more important than the entire 1 billion+ population of India.
What makes it seem odd to me is that the only argument I hear for GNOME is the licensing argument. Yeah, GNOME means commercial apps don't have to pay a dime to use GTK+ and so-on and so-forth, while on KDE they need to pay a few thousand for Qt. But that's held against a wealth of other features KDE has that GNOME is lacking, and the commercial app that can't afford to pay a couple thousand bucks to use Qt is pretty well screwed to start with.
I just expect a choice to be based off of more than that one point, and I keep not seeing it. I mean, KDE and Qt are just about universally considered easier to program for than GTK and GNOME, so you know that will save more money than the licenses will, and KDE has a better developed set of libraries as best I can tell. As I said, I just don't see the reasoning.
I always wonder why so many distributions insist on being GNOME-based. In general, it results in things like the list of apps that edubuntu uses. In short, the list has 18 KDE-apps, 1 GNOME-app, and 6 apps that use GTK but no desktop specific libs, despite the fact that Ubuntu is nominally GNOME-based. It seems that GNOME offers little in the way of important libraries, or more groups already writing GTK software for Linux would bother to make them GNOME apps, and less people would go to KDE as a platform.
Now, don't get me wrong, GNOME has made some great backend stuff. Beagle and GStreamer in particular jump to mind, but the desktop as a whole just doesn't seem to offer all that much. It's not even that I necessarily think that GNOME is the wrong choice (although I personally wouldn't choose it), it's just that all the distros that choose it (including Ubuntu and most everything else) don't appear to give any strong argument for why, so I'm somewhat confused as to what they base their decisions on.
Wouldn't the really elegant solution be to install the update in parellel, treated as a different version installed simultaneously, and have all new processes use the new version, only fully removing the old version when it is no longer in use, as opposed to just trying to get it freed up and doing nothing if it can't be freed up? I mean, last I'd heard, it was perfectly workable to have two versions of a library installed.
If, for that law, those charges are sufficient, it seems plenty strong. Afterall, aren't those rather patently true in this instance? I mean, it sure as heck makes itself hard to uninstall, and I'm quite certain it claims to be needed but actually is not.
If he described that as "The Street Performer Protocol", he's wrong. Street performers don't refuse to play if no-one pays them because that just doesn't work. Can you imagine if there was a guy on the street corner with a guitar, completely still, with a sign that said, "give me a dollar and I'll start playing"?
The street-performer method is what open-source currently has: a person goes out that and starts doing stuff, hoping that people will take note and grant money out of appreciation. This is wildly different from a ransom model.
"If they can sell all there songs for $1 I don't see why these couldn't sell at the same price."
Because people really, really like music and most of that music is new and fresh. Also, one good song gives more use than one good video. Owned videos tend to be watched two or three times by a person, maybe a few times a year if they are really good (this is purely anecdotal). Good music will often be listened to two or three times a day for several weeks in a row (also anecdotal). All told, the music is usually used for more total time due to the fact that it is passive entertainment. That is, you can listen to a song while doing almost anything, but you can do relatively little that is useful while watching a video.
They need to realize that, with those old shows, they have a very different market. The amount of people who desperately want their old shows to the point that they'll pay what they would for a recent one is very low, while the amount of people who will say, "Hey that was a kinda cool show. I'd like to have a copy of that for a couple of cents," is very high. And, since the entire show has already had its run and made its money, selling them at $0.25 or $0.50 a show instead of $1 per episode is still making a profit.
Naturally, I'd consider paying a half-dollar an episode for one of the good slightly old shows, like The Prisoner or The Six Million Dollar Man.
Well, technically, if someone else put up a server that worked with that client, you could use it without paying a monthly fee to the makers of WoW. That might sound ridiculous, but it has happened. Look up info on the UO Sphere server, which allows for independently hosted Ultima Online servers. Since the server was made independently of the Origin-run servers, they won the court-case about the issue and can legally offer free hosting for the UO client. A similar thing happened with Ragnarok Online, as I understand it, and they also won the court-case to allow for free servers.
Although it may seem unlikely that this would happen with WoW, it is possible and legal (although they might lose the case if it went to court, same as the reverse-engineered battlenet server did, being as Blizzard has won this sort of thing before).
A lot more incentive would be there if the government tried to charge all companies a direct cost for all clean-up required by the manufacture and expected usage of their products. And, if things were impossible to clean up (air pollution) charged for potential side-effects. After all, I'm going to have to pay for the crap they do sometime, so I'd rather if they had to pay for it now.
And, of course, the companies would pass the costs on to the customers and the prices of things that require a lot of pollution to produce or produce lots of pollution would skyrocket.
Right now, the US Government does everything on a very select basis, rather than trying to follow a reasonable and broad rule. For example, the way that nuclear power plants are massively charged for their nuclear waste while coal plants don't pay hardly anything for all the air pollution they put out that we can't possibly clean up.
Besides, that's the way capitalism should work: the product that is *actually* cheapest becomes the most popular. Right now, we just ignore tons of the expenses.
Buy an AlphaSmart.
It has 300+ hours of batterylife on only 3 AA batteries. How's that work? It only has a four-line monotype display and a keyboard, and it only has memory for ~80 pages types. But, if what you want to do is write, it's a portable word processor for $300 with the best battery life of ANY device on the market.
(I don't even care about a hand-crank; it only takes 3 damn batteries and it runs for about half a year at my usage levels.)
Half of the games out there intentionally avoid realistic graphics. Instead, they have cartoony, silly graphics. They make graphics that actually work for the game. And, guess what, they're quite successful.
You're dead on accurate with that one. I want a benchmark that will tell me what kind of performance I can expect if I have a logo I am editing in Illustrator that I open in Photoshop to clean up a bit and then insert into a document in InDesign while I'm trying to make it look similar in the webpage I'm putting together in TextPad, viewing both final documents through Acrobat, IE, FireFox, and Safari, all at the same time. (While listening to music.)
And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Although I rarely do all of that at once, it has been known to happen. And don't even get me started about what happens when I have something compiling behind all of that. I'm just thankful, in a way, that since I don't do 3D work I'm not tossing Maya into that mix.
The complaint usually involved here against China and India is in fact a valid one, especially against China. That is, they have less strict labor laws than the US, which is an unfair advantage of sorts. One of the main things increasing the cost of labor in the US is all the benefits companies have to pay to their workers and all the other restrictions put on them. India isn't too hideously far from the US in this regard, but it does have somewhat lower standards (from second-hand anecdotal evidence, I may be wrong), but China has far looser labor laws.
In the US, we had many unions organize and fight hard to get the rights we have. If we consider those rights to be inherent rights,then China is competing by denying rights to its citizens, which is not reasonable.
That is not to say that, even with those rights, they could not still undercut us, but they definitely couldn't undercut is by so vast a margin.
Let's go to the robotic track-and-field events and watch as robots designed to move quickly while pretending they're humans move quickly. Seriously, watching robots in any human only-sports would be incredibly boring. Robots will shine in sports designed for robots and sports where the primary element is not human (Formula 1, horse racing, camel racing).
Well, if they're paying only 50,000 a year per employee, on average, and half of their costs are in hardware and outside resources of other sorts, each million employs ten people, or 2,500 people to 5,000 people total in the company. By contrast, IBM employs more than 300,000 people and has revenues of about 100 billion each year. Note the orders of magnitude separating those numbers.
"Whatever happened to the Sherman anti-trust act?"
I guess we'll find out in the next few years, won't we? Of course, the sale hasn't been approved, yet, so it might only be the next few months.
And, the anti-trust act stops abuse of monopoly, not existence of monopoly, and I don't see any huge signs of that from the cable companies. Of course, someone here might have an example. Feel free to contribute one.
If GCC and BASH have problems due to memory errors, it's a problem with your memory, not those Nvidia drivers. If the errors aren't due to memory errors, it's not the Nvidia drivers. A great many people, myself included, use Nvidia drivers every day and revel in the fact that they are extremely reliable and have excellent 3D support.
That problem arises because "What is the German population" does not have a real answer. The population of *Germany* is what you want. The German population, even in Germany, is not the same as that, and really requires that an area be specified. However, of course, Google, doesn't do that specific of stuff well, so asking for a "German population" likely won't get an accurate answer for a while.
Yes, they do work.
Not designed with longevity in mind? What are you talking about? I'm still running the cheapest piece of crap I could find four years ago. An entire system (minus the video card, I reused my Voodoo3 2000) for only 200 bucks and it still works. My mother still has her fully working PC from back in 1997, without problems (although she's upgrading this month because she wants something a bit faster).
And anything newer than that, how do you know it won't last? For that matter, do you not realize that most of the components are identical? Apple doesn't usually make their own hardware, they buy it, and they buy it from the same people the PC manufacturers buy it from.
Stop spreading stupidity.
And focus on it.
In general, artists make money off of concerts. If you start out assuming that all your money will come from concerts, you can afford to have all your music online for free. Just make certain that the music you put online if not in some index directory, listed like:
Instead, list the songs in a way that will associate them with the concerts and make people want to come to the concerts. For example:
And, make sure you always play them at the event before letting people download them, but mention that you've got another song ready and will be playing it soon. Something of a teaser.
Also, since your webpage is most of your publication method, make it a place people want to check on regularly. Give all the band-members blogs on that site and make sure you keep news up-to-date. Keep an easy listing of where you'll be playing.
Also, make sure the site lets the fans participate. It could work to let them upload recordings of live shows, along with comments, so that they can keep talking about your show on your site even long after it's over.
And don't stop with just a little bit of stuff. Keep the site fresh, but don't let it change radically. Shift things bit by bit so that people gon't get too bored with it, but keep what exists in the same place so its easy to find.
Note that most of what you mentioned was invented in the 80's and then used in the 90's. Therefore, it seems possible some stuff invented in the 90's still hasn't become available
Also:
The Cell Architecture is new, as was the Emotion Engine. The Crusoe/Efficeon stuff was also new, although it didn't really pan out. I think that the design of the Blue Gene systems is also fairly new.